... notable events : Of helicopters and derelict 747s...

Cycling and exploring is one of the little pleasures in life to a young teenage kid curious about the wider world beyond the small confines of his house.

We had just shifted into our new house in SS3 in 1983. SS3 at the time was at the extreme outskirts of the Petaling Jaya township beyond which was empty undeveloped lands with small scattered kampungs.

Just across Jalan Majlis, the major arterial road fronting our new home, was an indian village. This wide expanse of zinc-roofed-timber-framed-squatter housing was a squalid place with yellow mud roads and open surface sewers. The storm drain that ran along one edge of our house crossed under the road and opened up into a dirty sewer-fed stream on the other side.

My first bicycle had been a cool blue chopper. This was the bike that had seen me through the primary school age in my previous home in SS2, a more established area in the middle of Petaling Jaya. SS2, like SS3, was also once the edge of the township when father had bought our first house there in the 1970s. My first explorations of SS2 had taken me up and down the residential blocks all the way to the edge of the rubber estates of rural Malaysia. Over the years, the expansions had engulfed the empty lands and SS2 had become the heart of town, with SS3 now the town's border.

Father had purchased the land and had hired an architect to raise his dream home on it. Contractors were employed and the land, once grazing ground for cows and overgrown with shrubs and trees, was backfilled to match the road level and pounded with timber piles to establish the foundations. My maternal grandfather, a civil engineer from China his Chinese degree unrecognised and hence disallowed from practicing in Malaysia, monitored the progress for us. Father winced everytime a new pile went it as it meant another few hundreds of dollars extra was being hammered into the ground. Eventually of course, our house was finally built, and in 1983, we proudly moved in.

I had by the time we arrived at our SS3 home, outgrown my chopper. Constant pleas for a new bicycle fell on deaf ears. It was that very storm drain next to father's new house that brought a change of heart to my parents. I had one day on my foot explorations of my new surroundings, found an abandonned bicycle at the bottom of the drain, some 2.5m down. It had a bent front tire and looked to have fallen in only recently. The frame looked to be in reasonable condition.

For days I eyed the abandonned bike. It was one of those expensive racer frames in a period when they were all the rage. Taking up the courage one day, I climbed down into the storm drain on our house side, and made my way through one of two tunnels which ran under the short service road fronting our driveway. At the end of this was a large area which opened to the sky prior to going under again into tunnels crossing Jalan Majlis, here the bicycle laid.

Dragging it home, I hid it at the back of the house, cleaning, hammering, bending and refixing what I could of it, excited with my newest project but fearful that mother would find out. For weeks I tinkered with it, for weeks it fought me and refused to align sufficiently to be roadworthy. That was when mom found out. I got an earful from her for picking up stuff out of storm drains, but it got me a new bike that year for my birthday. My parents had finally relented and I was very sternly told to rid myself of that old piece of garbage. But I didn't care. New wheels meant I could now range further and longer than on my mere two feet!

I explored everywhere. I conquered the indian village, I made hunter-gatherer-like foreys to the shops to buy candy, I imagined my bicycle was a highly modified Colonial Viper from the Battleship Galactica out searching for stray Cylon raiders. I was free!

Eventually, the indian village was torn down, and in it's place grew single storey low cost housing. I explored this as well but found it much, much less interesting than the old indian village with it's muddy paths, rickety houses and naked indian children running around, but what this development did was to open and connect yet another area to mine! Kelana Jaya, an area previously only accessible via a roundabout way was now a mere straight road away!

Eagerly I roamed the area, going as often as I could, sometimes right after school returning only when my tummy rumbled at dinnertime, but definitely during the weekends when I had two full days of free time. I ranged far and wide, all the way to the link road that led to the then Subang International Airport, the one and only major airport in Malaysia at the time.

It was along this route that I first noticed in one of the numerous terrace houses along one of the many side streets, that someone was constructing a small single-seater helicopter! I went back week after week, never quite daring to stop too long to stare, but often enough to see the slow progress. It stood filling half the driveway of the terrace house. I never saw the owner but I did see the slow incremental building of the small white coloured craft, from the base frame to the engine mounted on the top.

While this rather amazing aircraft was under construction, yet another aviation wonder appeared in my biking territory. In a large field which also incidently housed a fishing pond I had frequented on occasion, appeared an old derelict jumbo jet! It was obvious that someone had purchased it possibly to be converted into a restaurant or some other similar enterprising venture. For many weeks I would make the aviation rounds, to check on the progress of my little helicopter and then to see what was happening with the strange 747 in the middle of the field. I yearned to explore it but a high chain-linked fence and the fear of being caught kept me on the outside looking it.

One year passed. I don't remember exactly when but the helicopter disappeared one day. It had never been fixed with rotor blades and at the time I had thought it would probably have been the last thing I would see attached before it was taken away. But on hindsight, that was rather poor thinking on my part. The rotor blades were probably far too large to be mounted onto the frame in the middle of a terrace house driveway. I never saw the helicopter again. It was a bitter disappointing blow to me. I had so wanted to see it completed and perhaps even seen it flown. Nevertheless, one aviation wonder remained for me... the 747 jumbo jet in the middle of the Kelana Jaya field.

The expected development of the plane frame into a restaurant never materialised. Malaysia was firmly in the grips of a terrible recession. With the disappearance of the helicopter, I too was in turn gripped with a terrible fear that the plane might also simply one day disappear, and with it my chance of exploring the innards of the aviation world!

I picked up the courage one day, and together with my little sister, slipped into the fenced compound through a rusty gate. Circling the plane, I looked hard for a way in but there was only a singular open cabin door, high above me in the centre of the right wing. It seemed dangerous and thoughts of tearing my clothes in the climb, imagining stepping on rusted nails and bleeding to death within the plane, fears of unholy apparitions of passengers past appearing to scare the crap out of me, worries of the owners or their security guards appearing to arrest me for trespassing, ran riot through my head. I got cold feet that day, and turned tail.

I couldn't sleep for days. The 747 haunted me. It called to me. I wanted to explore it. I needed to see it. I yearned to go into it's unseen, unexplored, unlit interior. I went back 2 more times, and every single time, I found an excuse not to attempt the climb up the wing and turned back increasingly disgusted with myself.

On the fourth trip, I finally made up my mind to do it. My sister and I cycled there one evening and we parked our bikes in an inconspicuous place so as not to attract the notice of anyone who might take offense to my intrusion. I circled the plane, it's gleaming white steel and faded painted insignia still majestic in the failing sunlight. I concluded that since I had not attracted any undue attention or brought down severe repercussions during my 3 prior trips here, I should be reasonably safe. But it was the thought of losing exploration time with the sun low on the horizon that finally spurred me to action. Finding abandoned tires, old wooden crates and other such stuff, I stacked them just high enough for me to vault onto the large broad wing of the aircraft.  With my sister watching worriedly from below, I clambered into the plane.

It wasn't quite what I had expected. I don't even know what I had been expecting but it certainly wasn't this scene of total devastation within. The seats had been ripped out, the floor was strewn with discarded plastic panels, ripped carpets littered the place, and lengths of coloured wiring saggingly spanned from ceiling to wall. It was nothing but a shell. Even the overhead baggage compartments were gone. I walked the entire length of the aircraft, noting even that the small toilet cubicles were missing, as were the partitions for the crew kitchens. The cockpit was unfortunately locked, but I suspect, other than empty dials and sockets, nothing much would have been left for a curious teenager like me.

I was determined to take something for my troubles. Evidence perhaps of my having been here, a small souvenir of my little side adventure. I found little of interest. Everything had been ripped out probably for scrap or for recycling. Bitterly disappointed but feeling rather pleased with myself all the same for having done it, I took one last look around and left. I didn't exactly relish the thought of being caught up here when darkness finally fell. The aircraft was spooky. The story it told of past evidence of human occupation now so obviously missing made for wild imaginings in the fertile mind of a young teen. I also didn't really want to find myself some 3 metres off the ground and not able to see the ground in the darkness.

Holding onto a length of plastic tubing with an emergency mouthpiece from one of the overhead panels, the best souvenir I could find, I scurried back out the door onto the plane's wing, and with the last of the sunlight, gingerly eased my butt back down onto the precariously stacked jumble of rubbish I had so carefully placed earlier.

I'm not entirely sure what eventually became of that derelict. It never became the restaurant it had originally been destined for. It simply vanished one day. I lost interest in Kelana Jaya after that and seldom if ever, went cycling back that way. I was also a little older by then, and had started biking to school some 10km away on the weekends for scout gatherings and for an entirely new developing interest amongst my schoolmates and I, our earliest forays into the world of girls and skirts.